Advice

With its outstanding natural beauty, welcoming society and globally recognised universities, it’s easy to see why so many international students choose to study in Canada.

In fact, two of the country’s top institutions, the University of British Columbia, are together home to the greatest number of international students in North America.

As soon as you wake up in the morning with the whole day in front of you, it can seem as though you have plenty of time to get a million things done. 

At 10am it’s easy to think that you will be able to read three chapters of one of your set texts, write 1,000 words of an essay, tidy your room, cook a healthy meal and go for a 10k run. But by 4pm, you find that instead you‘ve watched far too many cat videos on YouTube and have only read two pages of an article. 

During these uncertain times many universities are pausing face-to-face teaching and university students are having to take online lectures. For some students this might prove quite a challenge.

It may not be easy to regulate your own studying and to utilise online lectures and seminars to their full potential but here are some ways in which you can do so. This is a general overview for all students, but your university may have specific measures in place so be sure to keep checking your emails and online portal for updates. 

Making friends at university can seem daunting, since most of your high school friends will have gone on to other colleges or other occupations, or are even in an entirely different country. As an international or native student, you can position yourself in a good place to make friends simply by being open to new experiences, attending new events and by starting up a conversation with a passer-by. Here are a few tips to get started:

1. Participate in orientation week events

Moving to Canada as an international student is both exciting and daunting. There is a unique culture here, so we have written about some of the things that we had to get used to when we first moved over. 

1. Food

While Canada does not have a lot of traditional dishes, poutine and maple syrup are popular and are often associated with Canada. Canadians pour maple syrup on pancakes, waffles and other foods as an act of patriotism. Poutine is French fries, smothered in gravy and cheese curds.

For many students who are considering studying abroad, one of the first hurdles to overcome is the application process, which varies between countries.

While some countries have a central system that enables you to apply to a limited number of universities in one go (such as Ucas in the UK) other countries, such as Switzerland, allow you to apply to as many universities as you want to but these must be applied to individually.

As application deadlines for universities around the world approach these are the grammatical rules that international applications should double check to ensure that their personal statements are up to standard.

Many students used the wrong prepositions (for example, “for”, “on”, “at”) and many do not consistently use the correct verb conjugation for the sentence subject. 

Applying to a British university can be a struggle, especially if you are not from the UK. The process, which is handled through a central admissions body called Ucas, requires you to submit, among other things, a personal statement and a reference letter.

The process may confuse not only you but also your parents. Yet rest assured that with some patience and care you can get through it all successfully, which will leave you feeling like you really can climb any mountains in your way.